Amanda Gonzalez remembers what Southwest Florida rock shows used to be like.

Gonzalez would go to concerts in her hometown of Naples, and she’d be one of the few women in the audience. Never mind onstage: It was almost entirely a boy’s club.

Fast forward to now, and Gonzalez and her noisy Gainesville punk band, BiteMarks, will share the stage Friday, May 24, with a diverse and inclusive group of bands. There are LGBT musicians, all-female bands and even a punk-rock act fronted by a drag queen.

BiteMarks(Photo: Special to The News-Press)

“I couldn’t be more excited,” Gonzalez says. “I almost feel emotional about it. I remember going to shows and being one of the very few women or Latinos.

“I consider myself a queer person, as well. So I really like how the LGBTQ community is also celebrated and accentuated.”

Gainesville punk band BiteMarks(Photo: Special to The News-Press)

That’s the point of the fourth-annual LYR’s BabeFest, a two-day music festival that opens Friday, May 24, in Fort Myers and then moves north Saturday, May 25, to Tampa’s Crowbar. The fest is organized by Love Your Rebellion, a local nonprofit created to empower marginalized groups through art, literature and music.

“We’re a diversity-first music festival,” says BabeFest and Love Your Rebellion founder Angela Page, whose band The Young Dead performs both nights. “It’s diverse in the sense that we have all kinds of people.

Angela Page of The Young Dead(Photo: Jesi Cason Photography)

“The music industry is for everyone. There’s space for everyone.”

The event started in 2016 as a celebration of female-fronted and female-focused rock bands — that’s why it’s called BabeFest. But now it’s grown to showcase other under-represented or under-appreciated musicians in rock ‘n’ roll, including LGBT and minority acts.

To that end, the Fort Myers lineup also features all-female post-punk/shoegaze trio The Nervous Girls; “witch-punk” riot-grrrl power quartet The Covenne; and drag-queen fronted punk rockers Butch Queen & The Bad Habits.

Butch Queen & The Band Habits(Photo: Charles E. Wolf)

Then the fest travels to Tampa’s Crowbar, where the lineup includes all-female Seattle shoegaze act Chastity Belt and Florida rock bands Palomino Blond and Broom Closet.

One big change this year: BabeFest has expanded beyond mostly local acts to include more bands from throughout Florida. Page’s The Young Dead is the only Southwest Florida band on either bill.

“I’ve been pulling in bands from all over,” Page says. “I’m trying to bring in other acts to show them what our city has to offer and to encourage them to come through on their own (whenever they go on tours)."

In Fort Myers, that means there will be bands from Tampa, Lakeland and Gainesville, where BiteMarks formed 2 ½ years ago.

“We all just got together and started making noise,” Gonzalez says about the band’s formation. “We knew that we wanted to start a full, loud band with electric guitar and drums and bass and a singer, but we had no idea what direction it was going to go into. So we just started making noise.”

As for the name, she says, there’s no special meaning. They just liked the way it sounded.

“It definitely says our music has a bite to it,” she says. “You’ll get bit!”

Gonzalez says she’s seen the music scene change a lot since her days as a teenager making music in Naples. In Southwest Florida and beyond, that means more female acts, more LGBT acts, more minority acts — and a lot of diversity in general.

Festivals like BabeFest show just how far we’ve come, she says. And they help inspire even more diversity in the future.

“It creates a safe space for everybody,” Gonzalez says. “A genuine one. … Seeing this kind of thing being put together and seeing it more frequently in other places in the United States just totally pumps me up.

“I feel like this time, in 2019, probably has the largest number of women, queer, P.O.C. (people of color) people in bands since starting out. And it’s a beautiful thing to see.”